Frankly, the answer to this seems mundane to me. I served in the Army and put up with hardship and abuse on a level no engineer would ever consider acceptable, and so did everyone else in my organization. Why? Because we deeply believed that what we were doing was worth it for the larger good of country, something bigger than us. It's the same reason athletes in sports that pay shit or nothing at all will do it, or parents will sacrifice, suffer incredible hardship, and sometimes die for their children.

When I moved to my current house, my neighbor had been an engineer for Tesla, but he burned out and decided to renovate his current house, which had an unused barn, into a destination bnb. I talked to him a lot about his experience and why he did it in the first place. He and other Tesla engineers were true believers. They were leading a green revolution that was going to save the world. SpaceX is in a similar situation. Achieving viable large-scale space travel is a literal moonshot that nerds dream about.

It's no mystery either why his antics have failed at Twitter. Nobody at Twitter believes that 140-character microblogging will save the world. They don't get to go to work feeling like firefighters or astronauts. They'll work for pay and comfort, not for mission.